Good Weather For Airstrikes

The Go! Team got the hardest beats and they brought them to us in spades in their first ever DC show at The Black Cat last Sunday. Due to a dastardly quesadilla I ingested on the Thursday before the show I was bedridden with food poisoning that entire weekend, but thanks to a certain miracle drug I was able to perservere and make it out to the Black Cat to see the Team in action along with a sampling of my friends from UVA and high school and Caroline Bocarosse, who totally hooked me up with tickets to the sold-out show. First let me preface this by saying that The Go! Team’s live show is unlike anything you will ever see, and is worth every penny of the ticket price regardless of how steep it is. TG!T rolled through DC last Sunday with their motley crew of multi-instrumentalists just raring to get the party started, and they succeeded on all accounts.

Team captain Ninja is one of the best and most engaging lead singers out there, and she consistently encouraged the crowd to get moving and start rocking out, and to her and the rest of the team’s credit there wasn’t a static body in the house by the end of the show. The Go! Team are far and away the most fun live band in the world right now, and I honestly feel like you could take anyone off the street - so long as they don’t detest enjoyment - to this show and they’d have the time of their lives. A testament to this is the fact that despite only playing a handful songs from their debut album Thunder Lightning Strike - Ninja prefaced at least half of the songs with a “this one’s not on the album” warning - the crowd still loved every minute of the show and danced along with every song. The setlist was split evenly between the hits from TLS and newer songs from the Are You Ready For More EP (only available on their 2005 Australian Tour and as a bonus disc on the UK re-issue of TLS), as well as a handful of brand new songs not found on either release. Of these new songs, instrumental track “The Wrath of Mikey”, a b-side from the Ladyflash EP, encore-choice “Titanic Vandalism” and “Doin’ It Right” were easily the best, and despite most of the crowd never having heard the song everyone was dancing along. As for the hits culled from Thunder Lightning Strike, every song sounded amazing and about ten times better in a live setting, and I’m pretty sure “Huddle Formation” and show-closer “Ladyflash” were two of the highlights of my life. Before launching into the former, Ninja took some time to clear up the lyrical ambiguity of the chorus, dividing the audience in half down the middle and having the right side sing “Keep banging on the door, ’cause we can’t hear a thing” and the left side return the call with “Keep shutting down the power, ’cause we can always sing”. All in all it was a night to remember, and you can rest assured I’ll be at the next Go! Team show the next time they come anywhere within three hours of DC. I’ve collected an assortment of the new tracks The Go! Team have been playing at shows, recorded at various locations on TG!T’s recent tours, including brand-new track, “Doin’ It Right”, first unveiled at SXSW less than two weeks ago. Finally, as an added bonus I’ve also thrown in an absolutely top-notch live rendition of “Huddle Formation” recorded live on Glasgow Beat 106 FM, which is great as it not only allows you to get a feeling for the intensity of the band’s live show, but also proves to be a very different listening experience, as the vocals are brought to the front of the mix and the lyrics are actually decipherable. Enjoy the downloads and stay tuned for a very special announcement later today.

MP3s:
“The Wrath of Mikey” - The Go! Team
“Doin’ It Right” (Live at SXSW) - The Go! Team (via Take Your Medicine)
“Titanic Vandalism” (Live in Austin) - The Go! Team
“Huddle Formation” (Glasgow Beat Session) - The Go! Team [highly recommended]

Also be sure to check out the collection of flawlessly-recorded live tracks I posted some days ago, as they’re all worth a listen and are nicely demonstrative of The Go! Team’s live sound.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.